Share this story

OAKLAND, CA—At a regularly scheduled city council meeting last night, the Oakland City Council unanimously accepted a $2 million federal grant that would create a round-the-clock "Domain Awareness Center" (DAC) in the West Coast port city. In doing so, Oakland thrust itself into the forefront of the national debate about surveillance and its limits—and two dozen vociferous protestors shouted "shame, shame, shame!" as the council voted after midnight to accept the money.

A May 2013 DAC slide (PDF) from a presentation by the Port of Oakland shows that the system would combine not only existing surveillance cameras and thermal imaging devices at the Port of Oakland, but also the Oakland Police Department's license plate readers, ShotSpotter gunshot detection devices, CCTV cameras, surveillance cameras at Oakland city schools, and dozens of other cameras from regional law enforcement agencies, including the California Highway Patrol. According to that schedule, the DAC should be fully operational by the end of June 2014, and it will aggregate more than 1,000 camera feeds.

Enlarge/ The Port of Oakland's own May 2013 slide describes combining over 1,000 cameras.

Port of Oakland

"Currently, the system is activated in times of emergency. If it is completed by July 2014, then we would be looking to staff the facility on a 24/7 basis," Renee Domingo, the city's director of emergency services and homeland security, told the council.

She added that the federal government would provide grants for the operation of the facility for the first two years, but that after that, it would be incumbent on the Port and the City of Oakland to staff the DAC.

Both the council and Domingo seemed unclear at times about how many cameras in total would be part of the system.

"The Port has 130 to 134 cameras, and there are four City of Oakland traffic cameras," she said. "As well as consideration in talking with [local transit agencies] BART, AC Transit, and Caltrans in cameras either that are in City of Oakland or bordering freeways. I'm not sure how many cameras they actually have."

One protestor shouted, "You can't vote on this if you don't know how many cameras you have!" Another attempted to show the above slide to the council members. All protestors were concerned about the increase in surveillance, arguing that simply having a complete picture of all current surveillance assets was itself likely to create problems.

UPDATE August 2, 2013 11:43am CT: In an e-mail sent to Ars, Troy Flint, a spokesperson for the Oakland Unified School District said that this relationship was "speculative/hopeful on their part and not the product of any discussions or agreements between the Port and the District."

"To that point, it's probably worth noting that, in a 2013 presentation, the Port uses an OUSD logo from three iterations ago that has been out-of-use for nearly a decade," he added. "I don't doubt that certain agencies may aspire to the citywide surveillance system that includes OUSD, but that does not mean we have been included in these plans. It certainly doesn't mean that we have collaborated in them merely because someone has invoked the name of organization."

A “mosaic” of data

Enlarge/ Local protestors distributed these flyers in the Oakland City Council meeting on Tuesday.

Cyrus Farivar

Other port cities across America have similar "Maritime Domain Awareness Centers" that have been constructed with federal grant money, including in the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Unlike the others, however, the proposed creation of this DAC appears to have generated significant protest locally and attention nationally.

The project was initially conceived for Oakland four years ago, and mention (PDF) of it turns up as part of the Obama Administration's stimulus package ("American Recovery and Reinvestment Act") from 2010. The concept appears to originate from a 2002-era Bush Administration policy document entitled "Securing the Homeland, Strengthening the Nation."

Local officials say that the center is simply an "upgrade" to an existing downtown Emergency Operations Center and is designed to combine 130 video surveillance cameras at the Port of Oakland (PDF)—the fifth-busiest port in the United States and the third-busiest on the West Coast—with those of the Oakland Police Department and the Oakland Fire Department.

"We have a lot further to go by creating this DAC. We're going to enhance the interoperability with those other agencies," Roberto Bernardo, a spokesperson for the Port of Oakland, told Ars. "To the extent that there is an emergency, all these agencies will be able to share and benefit from sharing of real-time information."

Bernardo cited the 1991 Oakland Hills fire as an example of a situation the city wants to avoid, describing the emergency response to it as "disjointed and siloed."

"People will be on their radios, relaying information—what this will do is that it will create a live video feed so that you don't have to rely on what people are saying on the radios," he added. "It's much more accurate to see something on a video screen than [to rely on] what people are saying over a radio channel."

But many privacy activists and civil libertarians don't see it that way. Protestors distributed "State Surveillance NO" flyers in the council chambers on Tuesday evening.

"This would pull together over one thousand cameras in the City and at the Port," Linda Lye, a local attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told Ars. "This aggregation of information paints a detailed picture. An entire mosaic has a lot more info than any single tile. So the 'mere' combination is significant and intrusive."

"There are serious questions whether a system such as the DAC—which is intended to collect and store vast amounts of information about Oakland residents who have engaged in no wrongdoing—should ever be approved," she wrote. "But what is even more troubling is that the City has not yet developed any guidelines on privacy and data retention. Although the City's contract for the DAC takes pains to describe in minute detail the precise manner in which, for example, metal framing systems are to be installed (studs are to be placed no more than 2 inches from abutting walls), there are no privacy provisions in place at all."

Events of the past few years have influenced the views of both Oakland police and its citizens. In addition to violent protests in the wake of the recent George Zimmerman verdict earlier this month, Occupy Oakland demonstrations in 2011 resulted in significant violence and injury to some protestors. A new feature film, Fruitvale Station, chronicles the 2009 shooting death of a man at an Oakland subway (BART) station. In many cases, mistrust between local police and some communities goes back decades, and the plan for a DAC aggravates old tensions.

Some protestors became louder as the night went on.

Cyrus Farivar

“Spies for the surveillance state”

One of the many citizens who came to speak, Lye told the council that the DAC had inadequate privacy provisions, and three council members did add language just before the item was heard to include more oversight of the process. The additional language says:

City of Oakland-owned cameras operated by the City in non-residential areas, City of Oakland Shot Spotter Audio Sensor System, and License Plate Recognition system; and that the addition of any new surveillance, security sensor or video analytics feed or data sources shall require approval of the Council, including confirmation of compliance with the City's Privacy and Data Retention Policy.

"That is helpful, but we also urge you to take the further step, that all of the sources that would feed the DAC also need to have privacy policies in place," Lye added, and the council again added further language to reflect that suggestion.

Still, many loudly decried expanding police powers, linking this project to the National Security Agency's broad electronic surveillance programs. The most boisterous protestors wanted the entire program scrapped.

"I think it's a travesty that the [Department of Homeland Security] has tapped our firefighters to be spies for the surveillance state," said Mary Madden of the group Alameda County Against Drones.

Bernardo, the port spokesperson, claimed that the city needs this additional surveillance capability as there are "overlapping jurisdictions"—indeed, many trucks that receive goods at the Port of Oakland drive through West Oakland and other neighborhoods. He added that the city plans on imposing privacy policies starting next year.

"We are working with City of Oakland stakeholders and we are having public meetings to create those policies and procedures and [ensure] that data security is protected," he said. "Those policies and procedures will be brought to city council in early 2014."

Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also said that the city's privacy assurances are not good enough.

"A thousand sensors that feed into one place is not the same as 1,000 identical sensors that each feed to 1,000 different places without exchanging information," he told Ars. "A network of cameras is rather unlike a bunch of un-networked cameras. Other variables include retention of the data, access to the data, or disclosure of the data. Much of the fight over privacy today is about aggregation and/or organization of already-collected data."

Share this story

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar